Practical Wisdom Quotes

“Emotions properly trained and modulated, Aristotle told his readers, are essential to being practically wise: We can experience fear, confidence, desire, anger, pity, and generally any kind of pleasure and pain either too much or too little, and in either case not properly. But to experience all this at the right time, toward the right objects, toward the right people, for the right reason, and in the right manner—that is the median and the best course, the course that is a mark of virtue.”
― Barry Schwartz, Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing

“There is no more effective way to destroy the leadership potential of young officers and noncommissioned officers than to deny them opportunities to make decisions appropriate for their assignments.”
― Barry Schwartz, Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing

“Most of us think about empathy as a “feeling” or an “emotion.” It is. To be empathetic is to be able to feel what the other person is feeling. But empathy is more than just a feeling. In order to be able to feel what another person is feeling, you need to be able to see the world as that other person sees it. This ability to take the perspective of another demands perception and imagination. Empathy thus reflects the integration of thinking and feeling.”
― Barry Schwartz, Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing

“Being able to criticize our own certainties is often a painful struggle, demanding some courage as we try to stand back and impartially judge ourselves and our own responsibility.”
― Barry Schwartz, Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing

“A person might have an all-consuming desire to maximize human happiness. But if that person has no comprehension of what sorts of things generally serve lasting human happiness; no capacity for recognizing other people’s emotion, aspirations, current purposes; no ability to engage in smoothly cooperative undertakings . . . then that person is not a moral saint. He is a pathetic fool, a hopeless busybody, a loose cannon, and a serious menace to society.”
― Barry Schwartz, Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing

“The ideal legal system, mused Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Cardozo, “would be a code at once so flexible and so minute, as to supply in advance for every conceivable situation the just and fitting rule.”
― Barry Schwartz, Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing